How Religious Man Became a Means

Part I

Imagine for a minute that you oversee a car manufacturer. The cars are produced assembly-line style and go from sheet metal to vehicle under your supervision. Now imagine that your cars were leaving the line with doors that were 1/16” off. They would mostly close, but not quite. If this was the result of your oversight, you would immediately locate the problem and address it. You would seek to ensure that the result you got from your manufacturing process was the result you intended to get. Those doors will close securely, by golly, if it’s on your watch! Because you make cars, you want to make sure that you make good cars. The value of your enterprise is judged by the quality of your product.

Much of the conversation about “why church” seems preoccupied with evaluating the quality of a religious product. Insofar as this product is judged to be deficient, we endeavor to fix the manufacturing process. If the doors of the car are a bit off, or the moral quality of our people is middling-to-poor, we want to figure out what we are doing wrong- how our manufacturing process is to blame. If churches are churning out pastors, programs, or parishioners that are damaged or not ideal in some way, we need to fix the process. Perhaps if we look “down the line” and see what went wrong, we could ensure better results, or at least prevent damage. Maybe procedures were overlooked or systems could be put in place that would prevent harm.

If the church were a factory, evaluating systems and adding safety checks would be the right call. But in treating the “problems” of church as if they were fixable through policies and procedures, through “trainings” and better programs, we are treating a different problem than the one we have. The problem that we have is that many are leaving churches that have failed because they do not know how to be churches, or even what it means to be churches.

What much of the “great dechurching” literature and commentary misses is that people are indicting the church for not doing something the church was never intended to do. It is as if the auto-parts factory were criticized for not making lamps. Churches do not make good people, run good programs, offer consistently accurate and prophetic social commentary, run cutting-edge therapeutic programs and trainings, and offer the best in theological education. They do something else- witness to another world.

The realignment that many seek in the local church- to not do harm, to be abuse-proof, to be forward thinking on social issues and sensitive to their communication of them, to be anti-patriarchy and anti-racist, to arrange and facilitate conversations on pressing political and social concerns, to organize community service that meet the distinct needs of the community the church finds itself in- all of these are well-intended goods, and perhaps necessary ones, but not strictly ecclesial ones.

The church does not to be realigned to get better results. She needs to stop acting as if results were the goal. She is rather an outpost, a witness, a sign and herald of an age that is just now dawning. All that is necessary is to be reminded of her mission- not to be a factory, but instead to be the only place in the world that tells the world the truth about itself.[1]

In the next series of essays, I hope we can do an audit on the cultural language and set of assumptions around why the local church exists. I have written before that theologians can be useful- like rescue divers or emergency responders, we have a skill set that is sometimes needed to get through the weeds and see what is really going on. In this case, my goal is to gain some clarity on the what the church is and what it is for in order to address some of the dechurching trends that we are observing.

The first part of my audit will concern how it is we got into this mess- how it is that we misunderstood the task of Christian doctrine and the church it serves. The second part will concern how we might get out of it.

Factories make cars, not people. But church is for people.

In 1984, George Lindbeck wrote The Nature of Doctrine. The book sought to examine a problem he identified with theological discourse- namely, that it did not “work” if two people were playing by different rules.

Lindbeck’s chief interest was in ecumenical dialogue. Ecumenical dialogue is conversation between practitioners of various religious traditions, on a theological topic, for the sake of reaching doctrinal clarity, gaining mutual understanding, and restoring friendship across difference.[2] What Lindbeck noticed is that the conversation did not go so well if the people in the room thought they were having different conversations.

There were, by his understanding, three views of how doctrine worked.

The first view thought that doctrine was the one, true statement about religious truths. Because the religious claims being discussed were known as propositional statements that were true, they must be understood in one way and one way only. There was a truth about God that could be known propositionally, and if a person did not agree to it, they were wrong.

The second view is that religion is primarily a set of practices and rituals that involve the soul in expressing its deepest longings. God is known in the experience of the soul expressing its desire for transcendence. As a person engages in the practices of its religious tradition, what is expressed is this longing for God- a desire that is shared among religious traditions. What matters religiously is what the soul expresses and experiences as it behaves “religiously”. Lindbeck writes that under this second view, “religions are seen as multiple suppliers of different forms of a single commodity needed for transcendent self-expression or self-realization.”[3]

One deficiency of these first two forms, for Lindbeck, was that they created an impossible dialogue about religion. The first view had reduced religion to facts and truth claims that could be distilled into propositions. It therefore reduced the practice of religion to knowing something. The second view had reduced religion to expressing or experiencing something transcendent and universal. It managed to distill religion to the practice of the individual while making religion, at its heart, something boundless and without distinction, shared by all people regardless of religious commitments. It had reduced the practice of religion to feeling something. Religion under such a view becomes something distinctively human, like therapy or art.

In our factory metaphor, the first view thinks that the religion factory yields propositional beliefs. The second factory makes religious experiences.

Neither view concerns itself with religious practices, with the forms of belief that results from being embedded in a multi-generational community. Neither form considers that religion might be a reality that people are invited into that extends beyond themselves and their beliefs and preferences.

Both the cognitive-propositional and the experiential-expressive forms predominate in the American context, but the experiential-expressive form has become increasingly prominent. It neatly correlates with the process of secularization that has affected the modern West.[4]

            “Secularization”, it should be noted, does not mean that modern man has become less religious. It means that the forms of institutional religion that have so long served to mediate the relation between the transcendent and the imminent have been replaced by highly individualistic forms. The heavens that once sought forth praise for the Psalmist now beckon man to “reach for the stars” through the force of his own intellect and industry. As Peter Berger memorably puts it,

“A sky empty of angels becomes open to the intervention of the astronomer and, eventually, of the astronaut.”[5] Lindbeck notes that.

Fewer and fewer contemporary people are deeply embedded in particular religious traditions or thoroughly involved in particular religious communities. This makes it hard for them to perceive or experience religion in cognitivist fashion as the acceptance of sets of objectively and immutably true propositions. Perhaps only those among whom the sects chiefly recruit who combine unusual insecurity with naievete can easily manage to do this.[6]

Religious people, instead, view religion as a set of inward experiences that promote self-acceptance and flourishing. Religion under such a view is one place to find a means of self-realization that is also on offer, though in a less organized fashion, from other vendors.

As Lindbeck sees it, theologians have unwittingly participated in the embrace of an experiential-expressive model of doctrine. “The exigencies of communicating their messages”, he writes, “in a privatistic cultural and social milieu lead them to commend public and communal traditions as optional aids in individual self-realization rather than as bearers of normative realities to be interiorized”.[7] The experiential-expressive approach derives “external features of a religion from inner experience”.[8] It is the inner experience of being religious that is the primary, orienting feature of this view of religion.

            Already in 1984 Lindbeck noted the prevalence of the experiential-expressive mode:

It is much easier in our day for religious interests to take the experiential-expressive form of individual quests for personal meaning. This is true even among theological conservatives, as is illustrated by the stress placed on conversion experiences by the heirs of pietism and revivalism. The structures of modernity press individuals to meet God first in the depths of their souls and then, perhaps, if they find something personally congenial, to become part of a tradition or join a church. Thus the traditions of religious thought and practice into which Westerners are most likely to be socialized conceals from them the social origins of their conviction that religion is a highly private and individual matter.[9]

Pursuing religion to find peace or deal with difficult emotional states has for at least two generations found a home in America. Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous articulation of sin as pride, dated to 1939, reflects a form of anxiety that may turn out to be historically located to the period of the Great Wars. Billy Graham’s famous altar calls that stressed man’s need to “be right with God” issued from this view—man was setting himself against God and the relationship needed to be righted- and generated a “path of salvation” that primarily issued in a feeling of spiritual contentment.

Though early evangelicals emphasized believing the right things, right beliefs also issued in right emotional states. One had “assurance” or “peace” or “joy”- all of which were felt in the soul. This view led to an understanding of salvation and a practice of evangelism that emphasized the private, personal, and emotional needs and fulfillment that “the gospel” would bring. All of these reflect an experiential-expressive view of religion that prioritizes inward states and allows inward states to guide and direct the development of external doctrines and religious practices.[10]

            Already in 1960, feminist critics argued that Niebuhr’s version of pride as the chief sin reflected a masculine view of the world that should not be taken as universal.[11] In our day, it is not pride that is the chief sin, but oppression and its perpetration. If man of Niebuhr’s day feared pride as the filth that would contaminate the soul, modern man fears instead guilt and the moral contamination that comes from being on the wrong side of history, an institution, or a cause.

Notable to Lindbeck’s experiential-expressive form, though perhaps not anticipated by him, is the degree to which other means of self-transcendence might replace traditionally religious ones. While religious goods under the experiential form might come in any number of fashions, reflecting cultural mores, they may also look increasingly less religious by traditional, institutional metrics. If justice is seen as a swifter, more efficient mode of self-transcendence, it will be favored as a means of reaching ultimate peace and therefore its pursuit may be considered a religious good under an experiential-expressive form of religion.

The degree to which the local church is required to reflect the political or social priorities of its congregants suggests that these goods have been made transcendent ones. The degree to which the pursuit of such goods eclipses the true goal of religious practice- to reach toward that which is beyond the human- is the degree to which religion becomes just one more form of organizing humans toward the goal of achieving human ends.

If the resolution of pride is humility, which is granted by the Christian practice of confession and absolution, the effective resolution of modern day’s guilt-anxiety occurs through persuading oneself and others that you are morally innocent and not complicit in harm. Because it is institutions that are seen as the perpetrator of much social harm,[12] the church is no longer a place to assuage guilt, but a site to place blame for the perpetration of harm.

Therefore the church today exists for many not as the site of an experiential-expressive encounter with God, but its foe. Individuals who seek transcendent meaning, self-expression, and communion with God are as likely to do so outside of it as within it. The religious instinct to seek the goods of self-transcendence and to achieve inner peace can be pursued individually, and it is believed more effectively, apart from an institution that may have behaved poorly in the past.

This prioritizing of individual experience over institutional form was predicted by Lindbeck in 1984. He writes that “The structures of modernity press individuals to meet God first in the depths of their souls and then, perhaps, if they find something personally congenial, to become part of a tradition or join a church.”[13] But whereas forty years ago the reminder that doctrine was not an  “optional [aid] in individual self-realization” might have found a hearing, today’s concern for moral innocence cuts against such a hope. If churches have failed to be morally pure, than the self-transcendence that moral purity affords is best sought outside of them.

So we have reached a moment wehre the institutional church is seen to impede personal righteousness, not promote it. Individuals who seek personal moral blamelessness feel it is their duty to indict the church of harms it may have been participant in. And so we now have individuals who see themselves as holier than the church.

The question is not whether a church is perfect or even good enough. It is whether she understands why she exists. The problem is not that the alignment of the doors are off a bit or that this church culture was not “Tov” enough. The problem is that the church is evaluating its processes instead of its identity. It is trying to make something or do something when its goal is instead to be something, to be through its worship a witness to another kingdom. When I write on church and church life, the feedback I often get is that “no church is perfect”. The concern I hold is not that churches are not perfect but that churches are not churches.

Lindbeck proposes a third understanding of doctrine that helps us to imagine what another form of the church might look like. We will discuss that form next.

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[1] This phrase comes from Stanley Hauerwas who uses similar versions of it frequently, see Hannah’s Child, 158 for one instance. I’d like to thank Matt Shedden for first goading me to read Lindbeck and then arguing with me about he might best be applied. Thanks, Matt.

[2] There are other goals as well. Ecumenical work has often struggled to reach one definition of why it exists!

[3] Lindbeck 22.

[4] See Charles Taylor, Peter Berger

[5] Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy, 113.

[6] Lindbeck 21.

[7] Lindbeck 23.

[8] Lindbeck 34.

[9] Lindbeck 22.

[10] Interestingly, evangelicalism has combined the cognitive-propositionalist and experiential-expressivist modes in its version of Christianity. I will discuss this further in future essays.

[11] Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View”, The Journal of Religion 40.2, 1960.

[12] That it is institutions more than individuals who are sought out for blame is a fascinating aspect of today’s moral framework.

[13] Lindbeck 22.